Straight after the State of the Union, there was the odd state of Tea Party spokeswoman Michelle Bachmann's eyes looking over our left shoulders as she spoke.

Last night, on "Saturday Night Live," we had Mark Zuckerberg staring so hard into the camera that he looked like an overcaffeinated nerd waiting desperately to secure a friend request--or at least a poke--from, well, Michelle Bachmann.

This was the latest attempt to shift Zuckerberg's image from that of a shifty privacy salesman to a lovable privacy salesman.

The man who, according to "The Social Network" at least, may have founded Facebook offered the eyes of a deer in spotlights, as he stood with Jesse Eisenberg--he who portrayed him as a barely human, possibly alien, morally questionable, sexually naive but intellectually superior coder in the Oscar-nominated movie.

Also standing onstage was Andy Samberg, who had qualified, perhaps, to portray the Facebook founder by virtue of having a hoodie and a name that ended in "erg."

On "SNL," Zuckerberg smiled a little too widely as he tried to tell a joke, as if desperate to poke the audience into laughter. Actually, the joke was about poking. And please, well, examine it for yourself.

One shouldn't expect Zuckerberg to be a comedy performer, just as one shouldn't expect Eisenberg to win an Oscar.

So let's just accept that this was another small step for Mark Zuckerberg's spiritual rehabilitation and another large, confident stride for the supreme hegemony of product placement.